“Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they’re being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out.” —Film critic Pauline Kael

With so much public discussion going on right now about sexual harassment in the workplace, including Hollywood, it seems an opportune time to take a very brief look back at how this subject has been treated in cinema over the years.

How forms of harassment, including sexual harassment, have been framed in popular movies can be helpful in understanding how the nation has viewed and addressed (or not) this issue.

I personally feel there is a connection between the two, if only indirectly. For the sake of brevity, I will limit my focus to a few remarks about the early years of moviemaking. This is a period when some of the industry’s most influential themes and female character types first appeared on screen.

To begin with, when I look at films from the 1930s, I see women depicted both as victims and victors. Scenes of females being sexually harassed were common and mostly played for laughs back then: the harassed secretary, the harassed show girl, the harassed cocktail waitress.

“Mashers,” a popular term in the '30s and '40s for men who hit on women they didn’t know, were usually portrayed as comic characters. Even “respectable” women were subject to a near constant barrage of “humorous” male come-ons and suggestive comments. (Many Marx Brothers routines, for example, centered on this one schtick.)

In the popular horror genre of the day, male sexual aggressiveness took on a form of extreme predatory behavior: "Dracula," "Frankenstein" (1931) and "The Old Dark House" (1932) come to mind.

Interestingly, there is a flipside to all this in the '30s. For example, one can also find numerous instances of strong, usually working class female characters (“tough broads”) more than holding their own in a male dominated world.

A wonderful example of this for me is "Baby Face," a 1933 pre-code Hollywood film starring Barbara Stanwyck, whose savvy, streetwise character gives as good as she gets. (It would be one of the last films for a very long time where a female character isn’t punished or belittled for having the same ambitions as a man.)

Jean Harlow is another example, using her quick tongue and acid wit to push back against he-men types like Clark Gable and Wallace Beery who want to dominate her ("Red Dust," 1932, "Dinner at Eight," 1933).

But by the end of the Second World War, depictions of women on screen had started to change. There were still strong women to be seen — Katherine Hepburn comes to mind — but some of the earlier feistiness was gone. More and more, female characters were being separated into categories of good and bad; the latter, such as those in film noir, were frequently viewed as largely socially unredeemable. Whatever fate awaited them, and it was usually either death or prison, it was understood to be deserved.

The arrival of the 1950s saw the sexual objectification of women reach new heights. A bevy of blondes and brunettes paraded across the screen, eager and willing eye candy for nearly any man who happen along.

The premise of many of these films seemed clear enough: Women were there to serve the needs of men; a girl often said no when she really meant yes. Moreover, the game of pursuit was one played willingly by both sides.

Many of these same dubious narratives would continue well into the 1960s and beyond.

It’s probably impossible to draw any definitive conclusions about how, or even if, such films contributed to acts of harassment against women in real life. But I suspect at the very least they aided and abetted certain hidebound sexist attitudes already in place.

Furthermore, they modeled many of these attitudes for generations of impressionable moviegoing young males. “This is how a real man behaves,” they suggested.

According to movie historian Marjorie Rosen, films are a mirror society holds up to its own “porous face.” It is long past time we scrub the mirror of many old chauvinistic images in order to get a more honest look at ourselves.